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Acting on the Guiding Principles for Great Customer Service - 11/19/24


In last week’s tip, we shared 5 Guiding Principles for Great Customer Service.  This week, let’s address what “taking action” looks like on those key principles.  If last week was about what to do and WHY, this week is about the HOW. Engage with Interest: To engage with interest, proactively Read more

Guiding Principles for Great Customer Service - 11/12/24


It’s hard to know every procedure, every policy, every technique possible to handle every situation correctly.  After all, maybe our procedures are standard, but our customers are not.  Maybe our policies stay pretty consistent, but our customers’ needs and issues, their attitudes and actions can change from customer to Read more

From a Simple Question to an Exceptional Experience - 11/5/24


Phyllis loves her job.  It’s not just because she loves being a customer service representative, not just because she really likes her co-workers, and not just because she enjoys her company.  It’s because she really appreciates her customers, as well. A customer had ordered a register book off the company Read more

Fix One Problem without Creating Another - 10/29/24


If you’ve ever had an issue with your dishwasher, this will sound familiar.  I’ve dealt with so many dishwashers over the years, and they always seem to have some kind of an issue.  Maybe it’s because of the mix of water and technology, but for whatever reason, these never Read more

Delight Your Customers - 10/22/24


Buddy the Bug Man was different.  His company was new, and the only reason why Janet tried him out was that the service she had used for years just wasn’t working.  Whether it was mosquitoes in the yard, ants in the kitchen, or cockroaches flying through on their way Read more

A More Complete Definition of Responsiveness - 10/15/24


I was purchasing something recently that was being custom-developed.  At one point, the company’s employee and I had a good 20 e-mails going back and forth - 10 from each of us.  Unfortunately, I broke my own rule, and I did not pick up the phone after 2 or Read more

Have a Game Plan to Address Their Anxiety - 10/8/24


It seems like we all get deliveries - whether it is UPS, USPS, FedEx, Amazon, the local courier, or all the above.  We order.  They deliver.  Or do they? It’s times like these, when we’re expecting that package, that item that we’re looking forward to or need urgently or are Read more

How Persistence Saved the Day - 10/1/24


Sherrie saw the customer walk into her store holding his cell phone, and Sherrie immediately knew that was William.  She had spoken to William on the phone about an hour ago, he said he would be at Sherrie’s cell phone store in less than an hour, and there he Read more

Notice the Little Changes - 9/24/24


“My, how times have changed.” Yes, times have changed.  As a matter of fact, one of the biggest reasons why an organization’s customer service deteriorates is that times have changed…customers have changed…and the company has not… If we think about customer service delivery today v. decades ago, changes in technology alone Read more

Don’t Hurry…Be Quick - 9/17/24


No, this is not a take off on the Bobby McFerrin song:  Don’t Worry Be Happy. It’s actually a take off on the John Wooden quote:  Be quick, but don’t hurry. When I read Wooden’s book with this title, I liked the concept, and not just because John Wooden was a Read more

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Compassion and Customer Satisfaction

Posted on August 16, 2012 in Business Advice, Healthcare Please leave a comment

We always say that the 3 Drivers of Customer Satisfaction in ANY business are the Attitudes/skills/knowledge of employees, the service delivery Processes, and the Products themselves. And if you begin digging deeper into the components of Attitude, Process, and Product, you realize that Attitudes and Processes are what make up the Customer Service portion of overall Customer Satisfaction. And when you dig deeper into the Attitude piece itself, you realize that this means different things to customers of different industries.

For example, a recent study showed that the aspect of Attitude that is most important to cancer patients is compassion. More than any aspect of the Processes or Products/Services received experienced by the cancer patients as well, having “a compassionate team of care providers…access to a knowledgeable, competent physician…and…being treated as human beings…are the most important correlates with patient satisfaction.”

Why is this important to know? When you think of the hundreds of interactions that a patient and their family may have with employees and physicians on the phone, face-to-face, and via e-mail over the course of an inpatient stay and soon thereafter, when you think about all the processes the patients experience, and when you think of all the services provided to them, it’s a daunting task to try to improve EVERYTHING to have a positive impact on patient satisfaction.

Instead, if a hospital knows the primary drivers of patient satisfaction, it gives them a focus, a “bang-for-the-buck” improvement strategy, and a way to get everyone to rally around a particular aspect of the patient experience.

So think about this for your business as well. Don’t feel the need to try to improve EVERYTHING. We work with many clients including hospitals to identify – in a precise and quantitative fashion – just this: What are the 1 or 2 or 3 aspects of the customer experience with the most significant impact on their willingness to recommend you to others or to return themselves?

Find the “compassion” correlation that applies to your business and your customers.

Interested in improving your company’s customer service? See more at… http://www.cssamerica.com/


Use Hospital Data to Drive Patient Loyalty

Posted on July 26, 2012 in Business Advice, Healthcare Please leave a comment

What’s most important – Satisfaction or Loyalty? In healthcare, it’s not necessarily an either/or proposition. To get to loyalty, you typically need satisfaction. Building satisfaction is facilitated by multiple visits reinforcing positive experiences. But whereas data has been vital for decades in treating patients and measuring patient satisfaction, data is much more recently being tapped to track, predict, and facilitate patient loyalty.

In the article Where do Patients’ Loyalties Lie? Building Revenue by Improving Satisfaction, the author interviews a Texas data provider to address the use of data to drive loyalty in healthcare. The author quotes a data provider that stated “they should measure their performance on [satisfaction] drivers and develop strategies to close gaps and improve performance. Hospitals should first focus on the areas with the least satisfaction and where improvement is feasible.” The article then notes that “Another way to build loyalty among patients is to ensure easy access to the organization’s services.”

So a couple of the key points – that apply to any business – include:

  • Know Satisfaction Drivers – Your organization may measure satisfaction, but does your organization statistically correlate satisfaction of individual attributes to overall Satisfaction, Willingness to Return, Willingness to Recommend, and Loyalty? Identify satisfaction and retention drivers.
  • Prioritize Improvement Efforts on Satisfaction Drivers Performing Poorly – Your organization may try to improve on poor aspects of the customer experience, but is it improving on attributes of the experience that truly impact loyalty? In other words, try to improve on what really matters.
  • Ensure Ease of Access to Services – What barriers exist to customers accessing your services, your information, your answers? Assess your website’s ease of navigation, your phone system, your directional signage to the facility, and your employees’ responsiveness to needs and requests to make sure they facilitate customer contact, not impede it.

Target improvement efforts, and eliminate barriers to loyalty.

Want to improve your own personal customer service skills? Go to: http://www.amigreatat.com/


Achieve and Improve

Posted on June 12, 2012 in Business Advice, Healthcare Please leave a comment

Hospitals learned years ago that their reimbursement from the Federal Government would begin being impacted by patient satisfaction. Essentially, the higher patient satisfaction, the higher the reimbursement. The hospital could potentially make less money for the same services provided if the patient satisfaction level was low.

But when that impact became more well-defined over the past couple years and has become a reality, it’s interesting to see how the Federal Government adjusts its reimbursement. HCAHPS (this new government mandated measurement/reimbursement program) is changing how hospitals get reimbursed, how they’re measured, and about what they care most.

According to Janette Jones, a consultant and HCAHPS expert with the healthcare research firm The Jackson Group, starting this summer, the Government will begin withholding reimbursement from hospitals based on patient satisfaction and clinical measures. The dollar impact can be as much as $500,000 for mid-sized hospitals, and more for larger hospitals.

And while the Achievement of key levels of performance comes into the calculation today, Improvement will also be considered down the road. And as Improvement in performance is taken into account, gradually the overall impact of the reimbursement will increase until 2% of Government reimbursement (in some cases equating to millions of dollars annually) is at-risk.

So the Government is focused on patient satisfaction, and it’s asking the hospitals to focus on two factors: Achievement and Improvement.

Think about your business in this manner. If your financial success was determined in part by achieving certain levels of customer satisfaction and then continually improving customer satisfaction, how would your priorities change? How would your strategies change? How would your decisions change?

When it comes to customer satisfaction – focus on Achievement and Improvement.

Listen to our latest podcast episode of “Stepping Up Service” on The MESH Network at http://themesh.tv/stepping-up-service/

Interested in improving your company’s customer service? See more at our new website! http://www.cssamerica.com/


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